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Unseen Hitchcock doc to be released

Hitchcock documentary to mark 70th anniversary of the liberation of Europe

A previously unseen Alfred Hitchcock documentary about the Holocaust is to be released later this year.

According to the London Independent, the iconic British director's film has been restored in the form Hitchcock intended, to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Europe.

Hitchcock - famous for classic films such as Psycho, Strangers on a Train and Vertigo - was originally asked to collect footage shot by a British army cameraman at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

The documentary was commissioned in order to educate the German people about the crimes committed by the Nazis, but it was not shown at the time.

It was first released incomplete in 1984 at the Berlin Film Festival. It was missing a sixth reel and was in poor quality, and was shown on PBS in the US a year later.

The documentary will be shown at film festivals and cinemas later in 2014, and will be broadcast on British television in 2015.

The curator of London's Imperial War Museum, Dr Tony Haggith, said: "It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British.

"Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there."

He added: "The digital restoration has made this material seem very fresh. One of the common remarks was that it [the film] was both terrible and brilliant at the same time."